Chapter I

Joe and Mattie Harper lived in Harlem. They lived in a four-room apartment in the second of a row of brown, unattractive-looking apartment buildings—six of them just alike—in One Hundred and Thirty-second Street.

They lived in Apartment 52, which means the fifth floor, and there was no elevator. But the rent was reasonable, fifty dollars, and both Joe and Mattie said they didn’t mind a “walk-up” at all—you get used to it after a while, and Mattie knew it kept her hips down. Then, too, by going to the fifth floor, you get a much better view, though why a view of the building across the street—another brown barracks of exactly the same age and design—is desirable, only Joe and Mattie and other similarly situated folks know. The air was cleaner, though, on the fifth floor—they felt that any one would know that.

One Hundred and Thirty-second Street, Harlem, lacked all outstanding features. If the street signs had suddenly disappeared, there would have been nothing to identify it, to pin it to—a bleak street, without trees, a fairly clean street, decent and neat looking (after the garbage man had passed and the tins had disappeared), wide enough to lack misery, narrow enough to lack grandeur.

We are about to have two meals with Joe and Mattie—the most important meals of their day, for Joe’s lunch was usually a sandwich and a glass of milk at the Automat, or beans or a beef stew in the lunch room across from his office; Mattie’s a glass of soda and a sandwich or a dish of ice cream, if she were down-town—it is a shame about the new price of sodas—a scramble of left overs from last night’s dinner, if she spent the day at home.

Breakfast:

The alarm clock had buzzed at six-thirty, as it always did. It was a good alarm clock and had cost $1.48 at Liggett’s, two years before.

Mattie’s little dog, who slept in the front hall, had heard the alarm and scrambled into their bedroom with his usual yip of pleasure—he was rather deaf, but he could make out sounds as definite as the ringing of a bell and he listened for the alarm each morning. He was a nice fellow, a white poodle, overly fat, with red-rimmed eyes. If you didn’t molest him nor try to pet him nor step on him, he wouldn’t snap or try to bite you. Mattie and Joe were quite fond of him and took him for walks in Central Park on Sundays or around Harlem in the evenings. His name had, in turn, been, stylishly, Snowball, Snoodles and Snookums and had at last reached Ikkle Floppit, all of which he answered to with stolid indifference.

Joe had heard the alarm, had jumped up and turned it off, and had waked Mattie, who slept more soundly. Ikkle Floppit had jumped, wheezily, upon the bed and licked all visible portions of Mattie’s face. Mattie, then, had given up trying to doze again and had stroked the dog’s uneven coat with a fond hand.

Toilets followed, rapid plunges into the dwarf-sized white tub with its rather insecure shower attachment—Joe talking while he shaved, about the office, the men who worked with him, his boss who didn’t appreciate him, the weather that was still too warm for comfort, their friends, the Taylors, who they both agreed were too stuck up for words since Taylor had got his new job.

“His people aren’t anything at all,” Mattie had said, “awfully ordinary—and the way they do put on airs, you’d think they amounted to something. Why, my cousin Mabel knew his sister in Perryville, where they used to live, and she said they weren’t anything at all there. And now, how they do go on with a maid and a car. They’ve never even taken us for a ride in their old car and they can hold their breath until I’d step into it. It beats all—”

And Joe, his face twisted for the razor’s path beyond the possibilities of conversation, had grunted assent.

Now Mattie had completed the simple breakfast, six pieces of toast, buttered unevenly and a bit burned on the edges, as always, a halved orange for each of them, some coffee and some bought preserves with a slight strawberry-like flavour. She and Joe faced each other over the almost clean tablecloth—it had been clean on Sunday and this was just Tuesday morning.

The dining-room was small, lighted vaguely with two court windows. Even now, at seven-thirty, the electric light had been turned on in the red and green glass electrolier.

Mattie knew the electrolier was out of fashion, she would have preferred a more modern “inverted bowl,” but this one was included with the apartment, so there seemed nothing to do about it. She would also have preferred mahogany to the fumed oak dining-room set, bought eight years before—she had bought the mahogany tea wagon with her last year’s Christmas money from Joe, looking forward to the time when they could buy a whole new mahogany set.

Mattie was not at all a bad-looking breakfast companion, seated there in her half-clean pink gingham bungalow apron—she wore these aprons constantly in the house to save her other clothes. She was a slender, brown-haired woman of about thirty, with clear brown eyes, a nose that turned slightly upward, a mouth inclined to be a little large, rather uneven but white teeth—indefinite features, a pleasant, usual, hard-to-place face.

And Joe, across from her, was equally pleasing, with a straight nose and rather a weak chin, dark hair starting to recede just a little at thirty-three, sloping shoulders inclined a bit to the roundness of the office man.

“What’s in the paper, Joe?” asked Mattie, already nibbling toast.

Joe, deep in the morning _World_, threw out interesting items—the progress of a murder trial, news of an airplane flight.

They talked about little things, a friend Joe had passed on the street the day before, the choice of a show for Friday or Saturday night—they tried to attend the theatre once each week, during the winter.

The door bell rang, three short rings. Ikkle Floppit gave three asthmatic yips. Mattie threw down her napkin, sprang to her feet.

“I’ll go,” she said, as she usually said it, “you go on eating or you’ll be late again. I bet it’s nothing but a bill, anyhow.”

She returned in a moment with a thick letter in her hand.

“From your mother, Joe,” she said.

She knew the printed address in the corner of the envelope, “The Banner Store, General Merchandise, E. J. Harper, Prop., Burton Center, Missouri,” the neat, old-fashioned handwriting, the post-mark.

Mattie and Joe had come from Burton Center, Mattie eight years and Joe nine years before. They had grown up together in Burton Center, one of the jolly crowd who attended the High School, went to Friday night dances, later were graduated into the older crowd, which meant a few more dances, went to the Opera House when a show came to town, had happy love affairs.

Joe and Mattie became engaged three years after Joe left High School, which was the year after Mattie graduated. Joe went to work at the Banner Store, under his father. But youth and ambition knew not Burton Center, so, a little later, Joe had come to New York in search of fortune.

He had not obeyed the usual law of fiction and forgotten Mattie, nor had Mattie changed while she waited. No, though Joe found neither fame nor fortune, he did get an office job that looked as if it might support two in comfort, if Mattie and Joe were the two concerned, took a vacation, went back to Burton Center, found Mattie even more alluring and dimpled and giggling than he had remembered her—how much prettier Burton Center girls looked than those in New York!—and they were married.

Eight years, then, of New York, of subway rides, of the weekly theatre, the weekly restaurant dinner, of apartment hunting about every second October, of infrequent clothes buying, of occasional calls on stray acquaintances, of little quarrels and little peace-makings, weekly letters from home—little lives going on—

Joe tore open the letter.

“Gee, it’s a thick one,” he said.

Then:

“Well, I guess they are all well or ma wouldn’t have written so much. Listen, Mattie.”

Joe read the letter, a folksy letter—Mrs. Harper, senior, was well and so was “your father,” as all mothers speak of their husbands to their children, in letters. She had seen Millie’s mother a few days before and she was looking well and hoping to see them soon in Burton Center. The youngest Rosemond girl was engaged to a Mr. Secor from St. Louis, who was in the lumber business.

Then there followed, long and unparagraphed, something that made Joe and Mattie look at each other, hard and seriously, across the table. For Joe’s mother had written something that they had always thought might be suggested to them but they had never discussed, even with each other:

“Your father isn’t as well as he once was, nor as young, you know,
and, though you need not worry about him, he is eating and sleeping
fine, even in hot weather, I think it would be better if you and
Mattie came here to live. You could step right into the store and
take charge of things as soon as you wanted to. It is not a big store
as you know, but your father has always made a nice living from it
and Burton Center is growing right along. The Millers have put up
some new bungalows out on Crescent Hill, you’d be surprised to see
how it has grown up out there, all of the young people are moving
out there and with the new Thirteenth Street car line it is very
convenient. The cottages are all taken but two, both white with green
blinds and room back of them for garages and we could get you one of
them if you wanted us to. The George Hendricks are living there and
Mr. and Mrs. Tucker and the Williams boy, Phillip, I think that’s
his name, you used to go with. The new country club isn’t far from
there and you could play tennis after work, which would be good for
you. I wish you could make up your mind at once, so you could get
here before long or your father will have to get a man to help him,
for he really ought to have more time to himself and take a nap after
dinner, now that the season’s trade is starting. Talk this over with
Mattie and let us know as soon as you can. I hope you are keeping
well in this changeable weather. Your father sends love to both and
so do I.

“Affectionately, your Mother.”

Mattie and Joe looked at each other, looked and looked and forgot their toast and coffee. But they saw each other not at all. Nor did they visualize One Hundred and Thirty-second Street, New York, drab and bare, nor even Fifth Avenue nor Broadway.

They saw a little town, with rows of old trees along its quiet streets, little white houses on little squares of green, each house with its hedge or its garden or its hammocked lawn, peace, and the smell of growing things after a rain—

“What say, Mattie?” asked Joe. “Sound pretty good? Of course, you’ve always said you loved New York and I don’t want to persuade you against your will. Perhaps you wouldn’t care to move—still, Burton Center, we’ve got some good friends there—it’d be sort of fun, seeing the old crowd, belong to a country club, tennis, things like that, even managing the business. But, of course, if you wouldn’t want to leave the city—”

Mattie, mentally, had far outdistanced him.

She clapped her hands, pleasantly excited.

“Joe can’t you just see that little house—I bet it’s awfully cute. Last summer, when we were out in the country, I certainly did envy people living in little houses—I get so tired of New York, sometimes. But I never wanted to say anything, knowing how much you liked it here. But that little house—we could sell all of our furniture except the tea wagon and the table in the living-room and my new dressing-table—it really would be cheaper to buy new things than to pay for shipping. And we could find out how many windows there are and I could get some new cretonne here—sort of set the styles in Burton Center. It sure would be funny, living back there and knowing everybody. Here I never see a soul I know in weeks, or talk to anybody. Honest, sometimes I get just hungry for—for people. The trouble is, we haven’t really got anything here.”

“I know,” Joe nodded. “New York’s all right for some people—if you’ve got money. It’s a great city all right, but we don’t get anything out of it. I get so sick of being squeezed into subways night and morning—hardly standing room all the way home—and no place to go Sundays or evenings but a movie or a show or to see people who live miles away and don’t care anything about you anyhow and who you see about twice a year. Burton Center will look awfully good—folks take an interest in you, there.”

“You bet they do.”

“And it isn’t as if I’ve failed here. I haven’t. I’m due for another raise pretty soon—but we aren’t putting anything aside, getting any place. It isn’t as if we were terribly poor. You look awfully well in your clothes on the street, but we are always having to skimp and do without things—we never have the best of anything, always cheap seats at shows or cheap meals in second-class restaurants, a cheap street to live on—it gets on a person’s nerves.”

“Why, I didn’t know you felt that way, Joe. I thought you liked New York. Why, it makes me so jealous, going down Fifth Avenue, seeing all those people in limousines, not a bit better nor better looking than I am, all dressed up, lolling back so—so superior, with nasty little dogs not near so nice as Floppit—and with chauffeurs and everything. Why, in Burton Center we’d be somebody, as good as any one. We could fix up that house awfully nice—and have a little garden and all that. But you said you hated the Banner Store so—now don’t go and make up your mind—”

“You needn’t worry about me. The Banner Store is all right—I think differently about things than I did years ago. I thought the city was just going to fall apart in my hand—but I found someone else got here first. I’m not complaining, you know. It isn’t that I’ve failed—why, in Burton Center they’ll look at us as a success, we’ll be city folks, don’t you see. They know I haven’t failed. I didn’t come sneaking back the year I left, the way Ray Wulberg did. No, sir, when folks came to New York to visit, we showed them a good time, took ’em to restaurants and shows—they think we got along fine here—that we’re all right—”

“You bet they do, Joe. But I just can hardly wait to see that cottage—and everybody. I bet Crescent Hill is awfully pretty. To-night, you write to your mother—don’t make it too sudden, you know, or too anxious—for you know how she is—she means fine, but she’ll like to spread the news about us coming back. You just say that, under the circumstances, as long as your father is getting old and needs you, you feel it’s your duty to go there and as soon as you can arrange your affairs and resign your position and train one of your assistants so that he can take care of your work—”

“You leave that to me. I can fix that part up all right.”

The buzzer of the dumb-waiter zinged into their talk.

“Joe, there’s the janitor. It’s late. You’d better hurry. You know the call-down you got last week for being late.”

Mattie and Joe arose simultaneously, Joe grabbed his paper, folded it conveniently, hurried to the door, Mattie after him.

“Going down-town to-day?” he asked.

“Thought I would, when I get the house straightened up. I want to look at a new waist. My good one is starting to tear at the back.”

“All right. I’ll be home early, about six-thirty—won’t have to stay over-time. In a few months, I’ll be my own boss, no hurrying off in the morning or rushing home in subways—we’ll fix that letter up to-night.”

He brushed off his mouth with his hand and gave Mattie the usual and rather hearty good-bye kiss and, closing the door behind him, Joe and Mattie parted for the day with visions of little houses nestling in green gardens uppermost in their minds.